Boy Meets Boy

Boy Meets Boy is a young adult novel by David Levithan, published in 2003. Set in a gay-friendly small town in America, it describes a few weeks in the lives of a group of high school students. The story follows the standard romantic trope usually known as "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" except that the main characters are both boys, the narrator Paul and newcomer Noah. The novel won a Lambda Literary Award in 2003. Plot summary Openly gay high school sophomore Paul lives in an LGBT-friendly small town in New Jersey. He is best friends with Joni, whom he has known since early childhood and to whom he came out in second grade, and Tony, who is also gay and who lives in the (much less accepting) next town over with his strict, religious parents. On a night out with Joni and Tony, while listening to a friend play music in a bookstore, Paul meets Noah and is instantly attracted to him. They discover that they attend the same school and after some miscommunication and false starts, they eventually reconnect and start to date. At the same time, Joni (who has recently broken up with her long-term boyfriend Ted for the twelfth time) starts to date Chuck, a football player who was extremely cruel to Paul's friend, Infinite Darlene, when his crush on her turned out to be unrequited. This relationship causes a great deal of tension within Joni and Paul's friendship, and it also upsets Ted and Infinite Darlene.